Role of Intercultural Communication in a business organisation: Is it Important?The 21st century is known to be the "text savvy" generation, and by "text savvy", it is meant that today's generation depends highly on mobile phones and computers to communicate or socialise through different communication tools. Having said this, the highlight therefore for this century is obviously communication and eventually communication is the key ingredient for any business organisation. Communication can be defined as the process or act, where a sender (encoder) sends or encodes a message, through a medium or channel to the receiver (decoder) who understands or decodes the message, and sends a feedback to the sender (Fang, M. (2012) lecture notes, BUS 101, Carrick Higher Education Institute.) However, communication is not that easy when practiced in the actual world as there's always a barrier to it which makes it ineffective at times. Physical, perceptual, emotional and cultural, language, gender and interpersonal issues are all barriers to communication. However, the most important ones remains the cultural and language problem. Intercultural communication which is the process of communicating with a person speaking a different language or belonging to a different ethnic background, is therefore, the main concern in today's business world. Hence, this essay will outline the importance of intercultural communication in the business organisation, but will also highlight one major problem of intercultural communication.Technology is moving fast day by day and it is causing globalisation and this is one of the most important aspects any manager of a business organisation has to cater for, as the more the business organisation is exposed to globalism, the more culturally diverse workforce they have to work with. Every country of the world has its own culture and culture is the main reason that differentiates one country from the other. The term culture has variously been defined and one definition of culture is "the sum of attitudes, customs, and beliefs that distinguishes one group of people from another. Culture can be defined as human creation (Freire, 1970). It is the human part of the environment (Wang, Brislin, Wang, Williams, & Chao, 2000). In other words, culture is the non-biological aspects of life. It is the process of generating and sharing meaning within a social system. This social system is comprised of values, norms and ways of behaving and so culture comprises the ways we interact, behave, and communicate with one another. People from different country behave differently and has their own lifestyle and way of doing things meaning that people are culturally diverse. Intercultural communication can briefly be defined as the process of sharing information on different levels of understanding, awareness and control between people with different cultural backgrounds where different cultural backgrounds include both national cultural differences...
